Session: Exploring Financial Inclusion’s Role in Family Financial and Overall Well-Being (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

Financial inclusion, the ability and opportunity to access financial products and services that help build wealth, is an important element in efforts to promote long-term financial well-being. Financial inclusion efforts promote use of safe and affordable products and services through regulated financial institutions (i.e., banks and credit unions) that meet the financial needs of and build wealth for consumers.

While financial inclusion is important for all, low-income, minority and financially vulnerable populations have less engagement than other populations (FDIC, 2014). Practice, policy and research efforts are underway to promote closer links between these populations with formal financial institutions. Practice efforts to promote inclusion for financially excluded populations are focused on both outreach and marketing, and working with financial institutions to encourage tailored products and services. Policy efforts to promote inclusion have encompassed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPBs) efforts to further regulate costly alternative financial services, such as payday loans, and promote universal children’s education savings accounts. In addition to gaining wealth, research findings suggest that financial inclusion may also shape financial behavior and contribute to family well-being.

To promote evidence-based financial inclusion policy and practice, further research is needed about the importance of financial inclusion for family financial well-being, as well as financial inclusion’s impact on family well-being. Knowledge about the effects of policy on financial inclusion can assist policymakers in their efforts to shape policy to meet the needs of financial vulnerable families.

This symposium will provide empirical evidence about the importance of financial inclusion on family financial and overall well-being. The first paper, Rainy Day Funds: Does Financial Knowledge or Bank Account Ownership Matter More? examines whether financial literacy or bank account ownership had a stronger association with emergency savings. Findings suggest that bank account ownership better explains emergency savings than financial knowledge, controlling for income and several other factors. The second paper, A Structural Equation Model of Financial Literacy, Financial Inclusion and Financial Capability in the U.S., examines the influence of financial inclusion and financial knowledge on financial capability.  Results indicate that financial inclusion, in combination with financial literacy, has a unique and important contribution to financial capability. The third paper, Child Development Accounts, Mother’s Depressive Symptoms, and Marital Status Change, investigates whether Child Development Accounts (CDAs) buffer adverse effects of marital status change on mother’s depression. Results suggest that CDAs mitigate negative effects of marital status on mother’s depressive symptoms, and therefore facilitate family well-being. The fourth paper, Exploring External Conditions and Emergency Savings in OECD Countries, investigates the role that external conditions play in shaping emergency savings across 21 OECD countries. Results indicate that neither GDP per capita nor the generosity of a country’s welfare policies explains emergency savings. However, a country’s income inequality has a strong negative relationship to emergency savings. By introducing new concepts into the models, conducting latent variable analysis, and linking multilevel data, findings of these four studies advance our current understanding of financial inclusion and family well-being.